Erika Graham-Goering - Böcker

The origins of modern European states are often traced back to the expansion of royal and princely authority in the late Middle Ages, transforming scattered power structures into centralized governments. Lordship and the Decentralized State in Late Medieval Europe rethinks state formation as a process of decentralization, exploring how these governments willingly left power to lesser political players. It challenges the assumption that the rise of states made lordship obsolete, showing instead how distributing authority among local lords reinforced the development of new political systems.The contributors tackle this fresh perspective on lordship and state formation from two complementary angles. Detailed snapshots of lordship in France and the Low Countries assess the political significance of different aspects of lordly power. Historiographical essays discuss frameworks for understanding relationships between lordship and the state in contexts across Europe. These comparative perspectives establish an innovative approach to a key question in political history.

Jeanne de Penthièvre (c.1326-1384), duchess of Brittany, was an active and determined ruler who maintained her claim to the duchy throughout a war of succession and even after her eventual defeat. This in-depth study examines Jeanne's administrative and legal records to explore her co-rule with her husband, the social implications of ducal authority, and her strategies of legitimization in the face of conflict. While studies of medieval political authority often privilege royal, male, and exclusive models of power, Erika Graham-Goering reveals how there were multiple coexisting standards of princely action, and it was the navigation of these expectations that was more important to the successful exercise of power than adhering to any single approach. Cutting across categories of hierarchy, gender, and collaborative rule, this perspective sheds light on women's rulership as a crucial component in the power structures of the early Hundred Years' War, and demonstrates that lordship retained salience as a political category even in a period of growing monarchical authority.

Medieval rulership is increasingly understood as the exercise of shared power, and nowhere was this partnership more evident than between married couples. The study of reputation provides a new way of assessing how the expectations of martial lordship adapted to this joint authority. This book examines the messy legacies of Jeanne de Penthièvre and Charles de Blois, duchess and duke of Brittany, and their fight to claim the ducal title at the start of the Hundred Years’ War. Their story was retold across a prolonged period of political turbulence by successive generations of narrators, who justified legitimate leadership according to disparate standards of sanctity, chivalry, and dynasty. This process shows how the gendering of one reputation influenced the gendering of the other, and how aristocratic attitudes towards violent conflict worked through positive and negative models for both the women and the men in charge.